Jack Lindsay

Collected Poems

Illustrated by
Helen Lindsay

Lake Forest, Illinois

1981

STRAIN,
STRESS, AND BREAK
(Poems 1926‑1930)

The poems of 1926‑30 express
the impact of the English scene, social and cultural, and the struggle to preserve
the positions arrived at in Australia, partly through an attempt to revalue
Nietzsche and Blake, and to set out the Dionysian attitudes in terms that seem
more adequate to the situation. The increasing inner division finds a personal
expression, which the love poems seek to define and control.

POEMS
OF THE 1930s

The shock of experiences round
1930 (as told in Fanfrolico, and After) led to the breakdown of
the synthesis which, one way or another, had carried on through the 1920s. The
collapse of the idealist concept of life and art, which had been both the strength
and the weakness of the earlier decade, involved the loss of the unifying element
which had previously asserted itself. As a result we meet the dissolution of
the formative element in the imagery, in what I have called a flight into the
surrealist underworld. At the same time that dissolution leads into a nihilistic
set of attitudes, an analytic method tearing life to pieces and moving towards
a bitter disillusion.

But soon a counter movement
begins, an effort to find some purpose or constructive movement in history,
in the creative work of the past: what is here summed up as the search for Clues
of History. There is a movement towards a pantheism with a materialist basis.

But though this movement involves
positive aspects, the struggle to find an effective relationship between those
elements and the poet himself continues in a sharp way, with many resistances
to a new synthesis, a scepticism about any easy solutions of the inner tensions.
The sense of loss keeps reasserting itself, and nothing less than a total renunciation,
a total asceticism, is felt to be capable of resisting a fall‑back into
the old lures and acceptances. Gradually however the pantheist sense of communion
with nature and all things living grows stronger, and the poet feels that it
is possible to return to the world of people without betrayal of the lessons
he has learned. His experiences give him a sense of unity with all in humanity
that suffers, is downtrodden, exploited. He bursts into the political world,
seeking the causes with which he can thus identify himself. The outbreak of
the Spanish Civil War provides him with a scene, a situation, in which the drama
of his lonely struggle appears suddenly objectified, extended in history and
demanding full solidarity.

CONTENTS:

Flight into Surrealist Underworld ending with
Analytic Disillusion.
2nd.Clues of History leading out of the Maze.
3rd.Kinship with Tree and Bird.
4th. Cataract of Political and Social Process.

THE
HERO IN AND OUT OF THE MAZE
or CLUE OF DARKNESS1947

This poem was conceived as an
expression of the way in which the Hero (History, the People) had found his
way through the Maze and slain the (Fascist) monster of division. But in following
out the Myth I was forced to see the Hero as in turn himself becoming a betrayer
and failing to actualise the new potential union (with Ariadne, the earth‑bride).
I was thus driven to make a far more correct evaluation of the way things were
than I had consciously intended. In a sense the structure of the poem thus becomes
a prophecy of the way taken in the following three decades and expressed in
the poems then written: the sense of a vast liberation, with immense new potentialities
for human development and integration, and at the same time of unresolved problems
which were to check the liberation and raise afresh in worsened forms the question
of how to make the next large‑scale break‑through, how to avoid
world‑destruction.

A
WORLD OF HOPE AND ITS CHECK
(POEMS 1947‑1956)

Poems expressing the hopes of
regeneration and renewal as a result of the unity built up in the Antifascist
struggle, then in support of the Peace Movement against the Cold War, with finally
the terrible blow of the Kruschev revelations in 1956, which brought out how
much more deeply we needed to go into the contradictions and deformations of
our world.

THE
FINAL ARC
(Poems 1957‑79)

In the post‑1956 poems
there is an increasing effort to analyse history afresh, and to address each
poem to a particular person, as if only thus the poet could feel assured of
the human content of what he says. At the same time the poems are more than
ever linked with the work being done in other spheres. Problems of history are
linked with problems of science, of the methods by which men seek directly to
get inside nature and to use its laws and principles for purposes of integration
and disintegration. The poet is not satisfied that he has been able fully to
live up to the principles he arrived at in 1956 (‘Cast all illusions aside,
but reject disillustionment too’); but he is trying to keep them before him
as he faces what is happening to men, both in the socialist and in the capitalist
worlds.